It is easy to forget the joy that the start of a county cricket season brings.
It used to bring me nothing but nerves.

“All I’m worried about is surviving the first ball of the season from Allan Donald,” I once bellowed at a sports psychologist babbling on about targets for the next campaign.

Now it is very different. And not just because there are not many bouncers bowled these days. I get some stick from today’s players when I mention that, but national selector Geoff Miller said he “couldn’t agree more” when I put that statement to him on the season’s opening day last week at Edgbaston.

He admitted that the England management sometimes had to use bowling machines and bowlers bowling from shorter distances to discover whether some aspiring international players could cope with the short stuff.

It was a pleasure to be at Edgbaston when the county curtain was lifted. There was joviality and excitement in the air. One journalist I have always considered an equal in sartorial scruffiness appeared unexpectedly in shirt and tie. “Always at the start of the season,” he beamed. “Best day of the year,” friends stated without apparent exaggeration on Twitter.

Miller bounced into the Birmingham press box, a scarf around his neck to remind us of the earliness of the season’s start (although he did not burst into after-dinner mode about the snow he experienced at Buxton in June 1975) and the same old cheeky smile that makes him such a popular but still sagacious selector.

As ever, he wanted to quiz us, not about the cricketers on show (he could see for himself that Warwickshire’s Chris Wright was bowling mightily effectively and that Rikki Clarke was not too shabby either), but about our knowledge of cricketing trivia. “Name all the England Test cricketers since 1975 with surnames beginning with the letters A, B and C,” he said.

And in a perfect way to start the season, off we went on a journey of recollection, with Vic Marks, of The Guardian, noting down all our answers, as myself, Paul Bolton of this parish, Michael Henderson, Richard Hobson of the Thunderer, and others shouted out names.

Three Butchers, three Cooks, two Bairstows and so on. I was pretty happy with my answer of Joey Benjamin (“no one gets him,” said Miller), ‘Hendo’ equally so with Richard Blakey. There was bonhomie in the box. Not that we were ignoring the cricket outside, of course. Miller certainly was not. This was the first of about 120 days at county cricket for him this season (and about “65,000 miles” he reckons).

And not that Miller was telling us whom he was watching. “I never name names,” he said to me in later, stressing that he could be looking as far ahead as five years.

Selection has changed much, and mostly for the better. “It’s not like in your day,” said Miller, “when they said ‘this Steve James looks like he might be an England player, let’s give him a chance’ – and then, ‘oh, no we’re wrong’.”

Yes, thanks for that ‘Dusty’. They were wrong. But he is right. “The finding out is now done in the pathway,” he said. That does sound a little too much like management-speak, but what Miller is referring to is the England Performance Programme and the Lions. England find out about their players there.

Even someone such as Nick Compton, whose late-developing county performances propelled his name into contention, spent a little time on that ‘pathway’, long enough for Miller and co to assess his character in an environment away from his county comforts.

“You see something that has been happening over a period of time,” said Miller. “But he doesn’t automatically join the England group, he joins the pathway to see how he copes with that mentally.”

Even then there is still some guesswork. For, as Warren Gatland, the British and Irish Lions rugby coach with some big decisions to make before April 30, said recently, selection is only essentially a matter of opinion.

But opinion can be many things – informed, speculative and even biased. So I asked Miller if he spoke to county coaches much. “Yes, I do, but more about opposition players than their own,” he said.

You can see why. Former England coach Duncan Fletcher always said he preferred to watch matches alone, away from biased opinions. We all like to be selectors, but being the selector? Now that is not so easy.